In a new open letter published by CNBC, Blackberry’s interim CEO and Executive Chairman John Chen attempted to lay out a rosy picture for the company’s future, using a scattering of assertions that are, despite a desire to will them into truth, just not fully grounded in reality.

Chen is steering BlackBerry toward a future driven almost entirely by the enterprise. That's a good call, as it is BlackBerry’s first and best customer base. Despite the company’s dependence over the past few years on the sale of cheap handsets overseas to prop up its service subscriber numbers, there are in fact companies that still use BlackBerry Enterprise Services. And, by default, BlackBerry has the largest installed base of mobile device management customers in the world—it practically invented the market segment.

But those laurels are precarious to rest on. And while Chen asserts that BlackBerry is the “only MDM [mobile device management] provider to obtain ‘Authority to Operate’ on US Defense Department networks” and claims, “This means the DOD is allowed to use only BlackBerry,” he’s speaking in the very present, and not future, tense.

BlackBerry devices are the only ones that have gotten permanent “ATO” from the DOD. However, Samsung’s KNOX mobile device security platform has also been given interim approval to operate on DOD networks, and the DOD is looking at a future where BlackBerry is no longer predominant.

In June, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the IT provider to DOD, awarded an MDM services and mobile application store contract to Digital Management, Inc.—an MDM systems integrator partnered with MobileIron. And the DOD’s Mobility Implementation Plan, which laid the groundwork for the MDM/MAS contract, is steering the military toward a multi-platform, multi-vendor future that may include BlackBerry, but not exclusively (largely because DOD’s IT leadership has doubts about BlackBerry’s future).

The DOD is BlackBerry’s biggest single customer. But when the Army launched its own Apps marketplace two years ago, how many of its apps were for the BlackBerry? Zero. The first wave of apps was all for Apple iOS, and the second wave was all Android.

BBM

Let's press on. Chen claims the BBM messaging service is another major bright spot—“the most secure mobile-messaging service, and consumers love it, too.” He claims more than 40 million Apple iOS and Android users became registered BBM users in the last two months and says that BlackBerry plans “to turn [BBM] into a revenue stream in the coming years.”

Just how BlackBerry plans to turn BBM into a revenue stream is not quite a fully formed thought yet. 40 million registered users are great when you’re talking about Sybase database licenses, but it doesn’t really translate into a massive groundswell of cash when the app those people signed up for is free and its usage levels are debatable. A straw poll of people I know who have downloaded BBM for their non-BlackBerry devices indicates they’ve done so mostly because they have older, BlackBerry-owning relatives they want to (or have to) communicate with.

QNX

The third point of Chen’s four-point defense of BlackBerry is QNX, the real-time operating system. The basis of OnStar in-car technology and used in Cisco routers, QNX is destined to get bigger and bigger as more devices become tethered to the Internet to leverage machine-to-machine communications (M2M). I’m going to give Chen this point, because I think it’s the part of BlackBerry’s business that was the least abused by management gyrations over the past few years—and therefore remains most intact.

Developing markets

Finally, BlackBerry has a new partnership with Foxconn to take over the manufacturing of handsets for Indonesia and “other fast-growing markets,” as Chen puts it. Reading between the lines, BlackBerry is conceding its loss of any role in the North American market outside of its captive audiences in highly regulated industries (like defense) while also focusing on delivering “high-quality products at competitive prices” to developing markets where the company doesn’t have an also-ran reputation. I don’t know if this point is really a plus, but it does put BlackBerry in a position to stay semi-relevant while continuing its dramatic downsizing into what Chen calls a “nimbler, more agile competitor.”

So, yes, BlackBerry lives on, with $3 billion in cash in the bank from its leveraged buyout-turned-financing program. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. And maybe the company will soft-land as a mobile device management and embedded systems software company, with enough of a market share to justify the debt it took on. But the new direction Chen has mapped out looks more like damage control than steering the ship toward victory.

Not going anywhere soon? What are the chances they'll still be around in 5 years? They don't seem very bright to me, but on the other hand it's been a long time since your average consumer has given a shit about BlackBerry, so maybe they'll keep on kicking in some form or another.

This reminds me very much of the talk coming from AMD. The CEO is trying to persuade us not only that the consumer phone business isn't important to Blackberry's future, but also that this is somehow the right time to leave the market in favour of "new opportunities".

Not going anywhere soon? What are the chances they'll still be around in 5 years? They don't seem very bright to me, but on the other hand it's been a long time since your average consumer has given a shit about BlackBerry, so maybe they'll keep on kicking in some form or another.

I don't have a crystal ball that tells me Blackberry's future, but I suspect that the reasoning behind virtually all of these predictions is wrong. They tend to focus upon the consumer market, with a thin commentary on corporate and government clients that lacks any inside knowledge of those sectors. Well, the consumer market is outside of Blackberry's sights so that's hardly relevant. As for the outcome in corporate and government markets, I would need something a lot better than hand waving to convince me that Blackberry is on the route to success or failure.

I wouldn't be so optimistic about the future of QNX. Sure, as an OS nerd, I can appreciate its microkernel architecture with synchronous interprocess communication. But Linus Torvalds spent most of the 1990s demonstrating to OS nerds that the simplicity of a monolithic kernel outweighs the benefits of a microkernel architecture as long as the kernel components are open-source.

QNX is trying to occupy the gap between VxWorks and Linux, but it's unclear that there is actually any sustainable market in that gap. High-end applications like aerospace and industrial controls are pretty well served by VxWorks, and it's very difficult to imagine that a future "Internet of Things" would be based on proprietary software with per-device licensing fees.

As an example of how Linux has subsumed the rationale for QNX, there is a Linux kernel module called SIMPL which implements the SendMsg class of IPC primitives as syscalls so that one can develop a set of Linux processes using the same cooperative multitasking model as used by QNX system servers.

The funny thing is that the microkernel architecture didn't just fall by the wayside since its academic heyday in the 1980s. Over the past decade, there's been far more research into operating systems that run all system and user code in a single address space, using compilers and/or virtual machines rather than page tables and hardware MMUs to enforce memory protections. The state of the art is moving away from the concept of many communicating processes as embodied by microkernel architecture.

BB10 can run android apps. Why would the military develop a straight BB app?

If even the largest Blackberry customer finds a native BB10 port too much of a hassle, there are far more important questions. The most important being: why did they waste so much goddamn time on a new OS with a new API when all people wanted was a hypervisor?

I wouldn't be so optimistic about the future of QNX. Sure, as an OS nerd, I can appreciate its microkernel architecture with synchronous interprocess communication. But Linus Torvalds spent most of the 1990s demonstrating to OS nerds that the simplicity of a monolithic kernel outweighs the benefits of a microkernel architecture as long as the kernel components are open-source.

You have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of microkernels in general and QNX in particular.

It kind of sounds like your knowledge of microkernels ends somewhere around Mach.

Microkernels have valuable advantages in the area of fault isolation, fault tolerance, realtime operation, and security. Research continues and as cores continue to multiply, the decoupled nature of microkernels may still have a few surprises left for the "if it ain't Linux, its crap!" crowd.

And I for one am quite happy that multiple different approaches that service different needs continue to be actively developed.

However, I certainly wouldn't disagree that QNX would be better off out from under the doomed BB umbrella.

He should be given points for doing damage control as opposed to... well I still haven't figured out exactly what the previous leadership was doing (besides smacktalks and making this guy's job 10x harder than it needs to be).

there are in fact companies that still use BlackBerry Enterprise Services

By that, you mean, "all of them that ever had it," right? Anybody that ran BES is still running BES.

Not true. My company pulled the plug on BES a year or two ago. Used to be, anyone above a certain level got a company issued Blackberry. Then about 4 years ago, most of the VPs and above had switched to iPhones, and wanted to be able to carry just the one phone. That's when IT realized that users were happy to trade the in-house tech support for just being able to use their own phones, so they could save money on both the cost of the phones AND in not providing tech support for them. They literally went from supporting a few hundred Blackberries to about 40 in under 3 years. At that point, it stopped making sense to even bother with Blackberry.

there are in fact companies that still use BlackBerry Enterprise Services

By that, you mean, "all of them that ever had it," right? Anybody that ran BES is still running BES.

Not true. My company pulled the plug on BES a year or two ago. Used to be, anyone above a certain level got a company issued Blackberry. Then about 4 years ago, most of the VPs and above had switched to iPhones, and wanted to be able to carry just the one phone. That's when IT realized that users were happy to trade the in-house tech support for just being able to use their own phones, so they could save money on both the cost of the phones AND in not providing tech support for them. They literally went from supporting a few hundred Blackberries to about 40 in under 3 years. At that point, it stopped making sense to even bother with Blackberry.

And to me, this is really the main point. We stopped using BES back in 2007 when the iPhone first came out exactly because the users all wanted to get an iPhone. Blackberry's main problem is that it does not have a great/compelling product offering when compared with iOS and Android. This leaves the new CEO in the unenviable position of having to talk up the existing capabilities while knowing full well that they don't have any real chance of competing with the new leaders for user mindshare.

To put in another way: today people will use BB mostly because they **have to** and not because they want to.

I wouldn't be so optimistic about the future of QNX. Sure, as an OS nerd, I can appreciate its microkernel architecture with synchronous interprocess communication. But Linus Torvalds spent most of the 1990s demonstrating to OS nerds that the simplicity of a monolithic kernel outweighs the benefits of a microkernel architecture as long as the kernel components are open-source.

QNX probably still has a place as one of the only few hard RTOSes still around. Linux's RT patches are good enough for 99% of RT needs, but if you must have provable deadlines then it's either QNX or VxWorks realistically, and QNX is much more powerful than VxWorks is.

That said I don't see a bright future for QNX. For most of what needs RTOSes, Linux is "good enough" with patches, and it's free and supports far more hardware.

Also there's still some interesting shit happening with Microkernels. L4's pretty nice in a lot of ways. Probably not enough to put a dent in the Linux behemoth, but still, quite a lot better than the old Mach world.

Now there was a guy who not only burned all the ships - he poisoned the supplies, slaughtered the horses, and provoked the natives to a state of war. Leo shows all the other CEOs how it's done in 'Alto.

Over the past decade, there's been far more research into operating systems that run all system and user code in a single address space, using compilers and/or virtual machines rather than page tables and hardware MMUs to enforce memory protections.

Really compilers? That sounds as likely to succeed as using compilers to handle instruction scheduling was for the Itanic Itanium EPIC fail architecture.

What is going to stop someone from hand-crafting a binary that will trash the OS if all that stands in the way is a (necessarily optional) system compiler?

Using virtual machines for process separation is more promising, of course, as it's not really a research project, but instead a rather old idea

I have no idea how Blackberry can trade on an American stock exchange with their history of misinformation.

The CNBC open letter from Chen goes from delusion to lies.

Quote:

Today, our company is strong financially, technologically savvy and is well-positioned for the future. In less than two months, my team and I have engineered a new strategy to stabilize the company, return to our core strength in enterprise and security, and maximize efficiencies....When it comes to enterprise, we're still the leader. Don't be fooled by the competition's rhetoric claiming to be more secure or having more experience than BlackBerry. With a global enterprise customer base exceeding 80,000, we have three times the number of customers compared to Good, AirWatch and MobileIron combined. This makes BlackBerry the leader in mobile-device management.

AirWatch, Apple, Google and the broader industry have been laughing for the past few years at these guys. My problem is that instead of quietly selling off assets, BlackBerry leadership has spewed what they certainly knew were outright lies. It's amazing the fourth generation of BlackBerry leadership in as many years want to try this again.

BlackBerry should spend less money curating their Wikipedia page and more on figuring out how to run their company or divest.

I find it fascinating that anyone thought there was a need to take a shot here.

Who the F*** is so worried about BB that they think it is necessary to drive a spike in? Is someone worried that there might remain another competitor in the market?

They're still the most secure, off the shelf, mobile devices in the market.

This makes them a "problem" when used by the DOD and others?

WTF is up? Governments, including many foreign (non NSA influenced) Govs, choose BB for a reason.

Why did this article even appear?

Because we know Apple, MS, and Google never complied with NSA data-mining, right? (Are there any other major mobile OS's?)

Edit: Despite the down-votes, I'm still asking myself why Merkle, and other leaders, are still using BlackBerries (yes I know she was hacked).

Do her security people now believe that an iPhone or WindowsPhone are more secure? (I won't even mention Android)

Merkel's "party" phone was hacked. Party as in political party. It was an Android phone. Her z10 was not hacked as far as we know. The German government phones use a crypto chip in place of the SDHC. The German government just ordered 40k z10. I guess that is their way of saying FU to the NSA.

While Android security is poor, at least they didn't offer up a new OS whose lock screen hacked, reved, hacked again, then reved again. Said phone also has an exploit to get past the lock screen via Siri.

Ars is kind of lacking in BlackBerry news. TMobile is going to host BES. It kind of sounds like a cloud deal to me, that is tmob does the hosting and I suppose provides a way to remotely manage the phones. BES not only manages BlackBerry (old and new OS), but iphone and Android as well. (How well, given the limitations of the iphone and Android for MDM, is another story. )

I feel like I'm one of the only ones rooting for Blackberry to get itself off the ground and back in the game. That said, I think their best bet is to focus on the software and go platform agnostic. Not to say they should stop making their own smart phones, but if they can get their security on all the major mobile platforms, offer their Z10 keyboard as an android (and windows phone) app (I'd pay for that in an instant, I loved the keyboard, but it wasn't enough to sell the platform over the general utility of Android).

That, I think, is their way forward. They have solid services, but almost nobody wants their hardware.

A little over a year ago, we finally made a company wide BYOD policy (before then it was limited to executives) and after doing so, a flood of old BBY devices were handed in. Within the first quarter, we had more than 2,000 out of a (then) user base of about 7,000. That fast.

So, WTF do you do with 2,000 functional but unwanted BBYs?

You hand them out to plant supervisors who normally don't get a data plan budget and suddenly they have handheld email devices for company use which is a pretty good deal for them.

And then, after BBY releases a BBM client for iOS and Android, it gets even easier for the bosses of these people to message them rather than email.

We still have more than 500 BBY handsets in inventory, which I'm sure will last at least a couple of years more as the become replacements or parts.

I seriously doubt if we would ever buy more of them, but if BBY survives at least 2 years longer and offers really cheap handsets, it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

But we did reach the point where even the most loyal BBY advocates had to concede the company was becoming a poor risk and BYOD seemed to be a better choice.

It would be interesting to try and figure out exactly why that is, and get some thoughts on what that might mean for Microsoft and companies who use a completely different platform.

Servers want to be Linux. If you look at the numbers, it dominates.

What does it mean for Microsoft?

From the viewpoint of industrial use, a rearguard action to maintain Windows 7 and Windows CE (yes, really) as a client level OS, but 10 years out that could be a lost battle because more and more machines are running Linux.

From the viewpoint of Enterprise, I suppose the future is cloud based subscriptions services and erosion of the Office franchise, with greater stress on enterprise services like mail, database services, etc.

Both are threatened models, in my opinion, and unless MS can make headway in mobile pretty soon, we could be having a "Blackberry" discussion about them in a few years. Well, not quite, but the share price could drop a lot more than Apple's has.

I think they should have capitalized on the reason why people install BBM on their IOS/Android devices (I have relatives I have to communicate with) and got away with a £5/year charge for the app (I just made that number up, because I would have paid that price personally).

Giving it away was a mistake IMHO. Unless they plan to make it ad-supported with a "Pro" option down the road.

It would be interesting to try and figure out exactly why that is, and get some thoughts on what that might mean for Microsoft and companies who use a completely different platform.

Servers want to be Linux. If you look at the numbers, it dominates.

What does it mean for Microsoft?

From the viewpoint of industrial use, a rearguard action to maintain Windows 7 and Windows CE (yes, really) as a client level OS, but 10 years out that could be a lost battle because more and more machines are running Linux.

From the viewpoint of Enterprise, I suppose the future is cloud based subscriptions services and erosion of the Office franchise, with greater stress on enterprise services like mail, database services, etc.

Both are threatened models, in my opinion, and unless MS can make headway in mobile pretty soon, we could be having a "Blackberry" discussion about them in a few years. Well, not quite, but the share price could drop a lot more than Apple's has.

The only Servers that want to be Linux are Web Servers. That's because Apache is cheap and good enough. Almost everything else is Windows.

Sorry. I'm in the tech support business. I run into Linux servers about 5 times out of 100 (usually in scientific or ecommerce establishments). The whole world uses MS Exchange for email and Active Directory for user and PC management, and CIFS for network storage -- even for cloud storage. Either that, or they are using Windows and GApps.

It would be interesting to try and figure out exactly why that is, and get some thoughts on what that might mean for Microsoft and companies who use a completely different platform.

Servers want to be Linux. If you look at the numbers, it dominates.

What does it mean for Microsoft?

From the viewpoint of industrial use, a rearguard action to maintain Windows 7 and Windows CE (yes, really) as a client level OS, but 10 years out that could be a lost battle because more and more machines are running Linux.

From the viewpoint of Enterprise, I suppose the future is cloud based subscriptions services and erosion of the Office franchise, with greater stress on enterprise services like mail, database services, etc.

Both are threatened models, in my opinion, and unless MS can make headway in mobile pretty soon, we could be having a "Blackberry" discussion about them in a few years. Well, not quite, but the share price could drop a lot more than Apple's has.

Apple will face many of the same problems.

Chrome OS which if I recall is very close to be considered a "Cloud" based operating system has taken a significant chunk out of iOS devices. I believe the future is indeed cloud based devices with personal cloud services being a major feature.

Of course these services would have to offer personal data encryption which is mean it has a huge barrier to entry because proper encryption currently is not easy to implement.

We need IPhone 5S biometrc easy for the common person to be able to store all their documents in the cloud and feel secure. Of course even then the personal security will basically prevent 2/3 of the earth's population from being able to use said device.

As long as Iran, China, and other highly restrictive governments remain on this lonlely planet we will have desktop and mobile device which allow for personal encryption.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.